The source code of EtherPad, a web-based word processor that allows people to work together in real-time, has been released by the developers. Now it’s possible to run EtherPad on other servers than just etherpad.com. Alternative servers like the swedish PiratePad have already been established.

This collaborative editor provides an update speed of twice a second making it very responsive. Though it’s a plain text editor it could be used to produce LaTeX code collaboratively. There are already semi-automatic solutions using perl and ruby. Together with an online compiler EtherPad could be a useful feature in LaTeX discussion forums helping to solve user’s problems and to develop solutions.